Sweetbitter

by Stephanie Danler

The inspector sat at bar 1 as the guests shuffled past. He stared placidly at a midpoint on the wall. Mr. Clausen, old enough to be the inspector’s father, rapped on the bar until the inspector met his eyes and said, “This is appalling. You’re as punitive and pointless as the damn meter maid.”

The restaurant would sit, an empty space anchored in me no matter where I went or what I did.

bar, where Parker was making espressos. How much I had taken for granted: being excited to walk through the door every day, making rounds to say hello to everyone, even in the days when no one responded.

She wanted a Mr. Bensen, Eugene, someone to deliver her to the rarefied world that she had always been entitled to but never able to access permanently.

“New Yorkers are never too happy for drinking.”

That was the morning I committed the first sin of love, which was to confuse beauty and a good sound track with knowledge.

The city was radiant and I felt untouchable. I experienced the boundlessness that ships cut from their moorings must feel. I experienced again that feeling of having money, paying the tolls, of being allowed to enter the race. Yes, I felt the freedom again, even if I couldn’t quite recapture the hope. I could have walked all night. All the times I’d been denied entrance, all the times I’d asked permission—but it was my city too.

The jargon, the tenets, the manifestos—it wasn’t just to make the guest feel better about spending their money. It was for us. To make us feel noble, called, necessary. They would miss me for a week. At most. Perhaps the biggest fallacy I subscribed to was that I was—that we were—irreplaceable.

“You know what I dislike? When people use the future as a consolation for the present. I don’t know if there is anything less helpful.”

People who pay attention to their plates in a way I want to call worshipful.